The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vis… - Sarah Vowell

In other words, every cent the French government spent on guns for the Americans was another centime it would not have to spend on butter for the starving peasants who would one day storm Versailles.

I’ve encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I’ve never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asleep that she has no idea when Daddy’s coming home.

While technically Maryland remained in the Union during the Civil War, it was the border state, a schizophrenic no-man’s-land with the North at its door and the South in its heart.